A curious network performance reduction noticed by many Windows Vista users of the 2CPU forum that became the talk of Slashdot last week has been identified as having been caused not by DRM, as Slashdot users expected, but by a curious prioritization 'feature' of Vista that's intentionally biased toward Media Player at the expense of network and system resources.

I don't see that as a flaw (maybe because I've never seen the behavior you describe).

What I worry about is the ability to declare yourself as a 'user-critical' process is essentially unrestricted, an on-your-honor thing. The abuses are just too powerful; I would think that there would have to be a whitelist to be allowed to use this priority, at least one controlled by Microsoft if not one controlled by the enduser.

We all remember back when popup ads first reared their ugly head how Microsoft declared that they would not be adding a popup blocker into IE4. They predicted that any site that maliciously used popups would be quickly abandoned by the Internet community, and that sites that used pop-ups as they were intended (to provide information for applets, f'rex) would be punished for other's sins by including a pop-up blocker in IE4. Before that, it was not including memory protection in Windows 95, as there were legitimate uses of it and any company whose products abused it would quickly kill themselves in the market and become dead weight on the shelves.